Free Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe Page B

her long affair with Jo Hesborn, and when two ricochets clash in interstellar space the rate of burnout as they fall in the direction of Planet Earth, though not phenomenal to the naked eye, certainly becomes fast when they reach the pull towards gravity. And where do the star-struck lovers hit the deck, except on the lush banks of the alligator playground?
    Marrying her again was another worst fatal move he had ever made. The two year itch excoriated, sooner perhaps than could have been expected, but no less sure for that, and he wondered how and when the split would come.
    Itch? St Vitus didn’t know he was born. Diana bored and harriedhim more than he could remember, the complications of their reunion making a Black Forest clock seem like Stonehenge. Why had he been such a fool as to give her a second chance, which she took as an opportunity to spill out all the unresolved grievances saved from the first time? Her muted way of tormenting him, honed by the mill of her abnormal existence with Jo, generated more pain than in their first, which even so had been unendurable.
    She declared herself to be an artist, obviously a road which Jo had set her on, but he could make no sense of her splashy style, and hardly knew whether he liked it or not. On a wet Saturday afternoon, which he’d hoped they would spend in bed, she unveiled her latest vast painting in the barn and asked what he thought.
    ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I like it. What colour! What composition! What do you call it?’
    ‘“Witch Doing Widdershins Under the Great Oak”. I thought you’d have more specific comments, though.’
    ‘Well, you could take that head out of the tree, and put it closer to the ground.’
    ‘You don’t know anything, do you? It’s not a head, it’s a ball of mistletoe.’
    He looked closer, hoping to make some sense of the bullshit. ‘Ah, so it is. Sorry. I do like it, though. You’re very talented, darling.’
    He wasn’t being serious, but she had to talk to somebody about her work. ‘In that case, why don’t you get me a commission from the firm to do a few book jackets?’
    And get his head kicked in by Norman Bakewell? ‘The head of the art department likes to choose his own people. He’s very cantankerous, and I wouldn’t like to get rid of him, he’s so good.’
    He tried to make up for this festering issue by arranging her first one man (Christ! Woman , you nit!) show. At the vernissage he heard a critic say how profoundly interesting her technique and subjects were, though that may have been due to the top classchampagne and food, because even while harried by someone Tom had the capacity to act generously towards them.
    Half the paintings and two pieces of sculpture were thumbed with little red sales tabs, and he noted with no resentment that the money went into her piggy-bank account. She would soon have enough saved not to starve when he kicked her out for the final final time.
    But how to do it? There were several ways of telling your wife you were fundamentally unsuited to putting up with her volatile moods, cosmic doubts, and too frequent manic depressions, which at the best she assumed went with the artistic temperament, and at the worst blamed on you.
    Riffling all possible options deadened the guilt which he felt too delicate and privileged to tolerate in middle age. If they had been living in the sixties he could have paid a rogue psychiatrist to put her in a halfway house and shoot her full of LSD, or to lay the blame on her parents and really drive her mad.
    More mercifully, he could inform her that he wanted a divorce when she was miserably out of sorts, one more hurt that would be hardly noticeable – if hurt it turned out to be.
    Perhaps better would be to say he wanted out when she was feeling so good that his decision couldn’t possibly be upsetting or, gallant and kind, he could soften her up with a couple of bottles of champagne over dinner, so that she would be too fuzzed to let his